A debate about the ethics of hunting wolves in the Northern Rocky
Mountains has taken a threatening turn after gruesome images of the animals,
dead and maimed by traps, swept the internet.

The FBI is investigating a report of an anonymous email received by
anti-trapping group Footloose Montana warning advocates will 'be the target
next'.

The group says it was likely singled out because it had criticised and
widely circulated a snapshot of a smiling trapper posed with a dying wolf
whose leg was caught in the metal jaws of a foothold trap on a patch of
blood-stained snow.

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - Photos of dead and maimed wolves have pervaded
the Internet in recent weeks, raising tensions in the Northern Rocky
Mountains over renewed hunting and trapping of the once federally protected
animals.

Escalating rancor between hunters and animal rights activists on social
media and websites centers on pictures of wolves killed or about to be
killed. Many have text celebrating the fact that Western states are allowing
more killing of the predators.

Commenting on a Facebook-posted image of two wolves strangled to death by
cable snares, an individual who identified himself as Shane Miller wrote
last month, "Very nice!! Don't stop now, you're just getting started!"

A person going by the name Matthew Brown posted the message, "Nice, one
down and a BUNCH to go!" in response to a Facebook image of a single wolf
choked to death in a snare.

Such pictures and commentary have intensified online arguments over the
ethics of hunting and trapping wolves. The debate took a threatening turn
this week with an anonymous email warning that animal rights advocates will
"be the target next."

In Idaho and Montana, hundreds of the animals have been killed -- mostly
through hunting -- less than a year after being removed from the U.S.
endangered species list.

Stripping the wolves of federal protection last spring opened the animals
to state wildlife management, including newly licensed hunting and trapping
designed to reduce their numbers from levels the states deemed too high.

Since the de-listing last May, Idaho has cut its wolf population by about
40 percent, from roughly 1,000 to about 600 or fewer. Some 260 wolves have
been killed in Montana, more than a third of its population, leaving an
estimated 650 remaining.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has also proposed lifting the
protected status for another 350 wolves in Wyoming.

The threatening note received by an anti-trapping group based in
Missoula, Montana, this week has drawn scrutiny from federal and local law
enforcement.

The group says it was likely singled out because it had criticized and
widely circulated a snapshot of a smiling trapper posed with a dying wolf
whose leg was caught in the metal jaws of a foothold trap on a patch of
blood-stained snow.

VILLAIN OR VICTIM?

Once common across most of North America, wolves were hunted, trapped and
poisoned to near extinction in the lower 48 states by the 1940s under a
government-sponsored program.

Decades later, biologists recognized that wolves had an essential role as
a predator in mountain ecosystems, leading to protection of the animal under
the Endangered Species Act.

Wolves were reintroduced in the mid-1990s over the vehement objections of
ranchers and sportsmen, who see the animals as a threat to livestock and
big-game animals such as elk and deer.

Environmentalists say the impact of wolves on cattle herds and wildlife
is overstated and that the recent removal of federal safeguards could push
the wolf back to the brink.

Wolves have long been vilified in the region as a menace, symbolizing for
some a distant federal bureaucracy imposing its rules on the West.

"They're putting us and our way of life out of business," said Ron
Casperson, co-owner of Saddle Springs Trophy Outfitters in Salmon, Idaho.
"It makes me sick every day I look at this country. These wolves ... I mean,
come on."

State wildlife managers had predicted that such passions would ease once
the wolves were de-listed and states gained control. But discourse on the
Internet and social networks appears to have grown more hostile.

Some hunters have expressed discomfort at the apparent bloodlust
unleashed on the Internet, which they see as tarnishing the reputation of a
sport that attracts less than 15 percent of Americans.

'SCREAMING FOR MERCY'

"There are two groups -- one supports fair chase and ethical hunting, and
the other views the reintroduction of wolves and the recovery with venom,"
said veteran sportsman Rod Bullis of Helena, Montana.

Idaho Fish and Game Commissioner Gary Power said he was bombarded with
letters and emails from people representing extremes on both sides of the
debate.

"There are some folks out there stirring the pot: Get rid of government,
get rid of this, they shoved it down our throats, kill them all,' and they
are adding to the contentiousness," he said.

Animal rights activists said they are sickened at the online flurry of
pictures depicting wolf kills, and alarmed by comments suggesting a growing
desire to shoot, trap and snare wolves.

"Roughly $40 million has been spent on wolf recovery, and now we are
witnessing the second extermination of wolves in the West," said Wendy
Keefover, director of carnivore protection for WildEarth Guardians.

Idaho and Montana are required to maintain about 150 wolves per state
each year to prevent federal protection from being imposed again.

But Idaho plans to more than double the number of wolves a hunter may
take in some areas for the 2012-13 season, raising their bag limit to 10.

Montana is seeking to raise its wolf-hunt quotas, and state wildlife
managers are discussing allowing trapping, which is currently illegal there.
At least one Montana county is considering a bounty for wolves killed by
licensed hunters.

This week's email threat to the animal advocacy group Footloose Montana
raised the acrimony to a new level.

The image posted on its Facebook page was taken from the Trapperman.com
website, including text that joked about the wolf being shot and wounded by
a passersby after it was caught -- "lucky they were not real good shots."

The photo went viral over the Internet last weekend, and on Monday
Footloose Montana received the email threat.

The message said "I would like to donate a gun to your childs (sic) head
to make sure you can watch it die slowly so I can have my picture taken with
it's (sic) bleeding dying screaming for mercy body." Then the email, a copy
of which Footloose gave to Reuters, said the recipients would be the next
targets.

A Missoula Police Department detective, Sergeant Travis Welsh, confirmed
this week that investigators were looking into a "report from a local
institution about a malicious email."

Footloose Executive Director Anja Heister said FBI agents had interviewed
a member of her group about the threat, but an FBI spokeswoman declined to
comment.

By Tuesday, Trapperman.com, a site whose mission statement declares,
"Always keep in mind that we are the true protectors of wildlife and the
wild places in which the animals live," had removed pictures of dead or
dying wolves and commentary.

HELENA - A Missoula-based anti-trapping organization said it received a
threatening email this month after the group posted graphic photos on the
Internet of a live Idaho wolf caught in a foot-hold trap.

Anja
Heister, executive director of Footloose Montana, on March 22 posted a
series of photos gleaned from an online trapping forum called Trapperman.com
on her personal and Footloose Montana Facebook sites.

Heister said
she opened Footloose Montana's email inbox on Monday and found what she
believed to be a death threat directed at family members of the
organization:

"I would like to donate (sic) a gun to your childs
(sic) head to make sure you can watch it die slowly so I can have my picture
taken with it's (sic) bleeding dying screaming for mercy body. YOU WILL BE
THE TARGET NEXT BITCHES!" the message read.

Heister said the email
was in response to the group posting photos of a northern Idaho trapper's
March 18 wolf kill, which was detailed on the online trapping forum.

The photos show trapper Josh Bransford, a fire management officer for the
Nez Perce National Forest, kneeling and smiling for the camera as a wolf he
caught in a foot-hold trap stands behind him in a ring of blood-soaked snow.
Another photo shows a close-up of the wolf's paw caught in the trap. A third
photo shows the trapper posing with his catch.

Heister said Footloose
Montana, which is actively campaigning to ban trapping in Montana, has
received plenty of hostile emails and phone calls since 2007 but never
anything that rose to this level.

"It has a cumulative effect on your
psyche," Heister said. "I'm not easily scared, but when I read this I got
really concerned."

Heister said she reported the threatening email to
local and federal law enforcement officials. Missoula Police Sgt. Travis
Welch confirmed the department received the report of the malicious email
and that it was assigned to an investigator, but he declined to comment
further.

In an online blog on Earth Island Journal's website, writer
James William Gibson recounted what Bransford -- who goes by the handle
"Pinching" -- wrote about the photos. Bransford's post has since been
removed.

"I got a call on Sunday morning from a FS (Forest Service)
cop that I know. You got one up here," the post said, and then continued,
"there was a crowd forming. Several guys had stopped and taken a shot at him
already," the post read, according to Gibson.

According to Bransford
the wolf was a 100-pound male with "no rub spots" making an "good wall
hanger."

Bransford did not return calls or emails seeking comment
Thursday.

As of late Thursday the photos posted on Footloose
Montana's Facebook page had received nearly 900 comments. Online commenters
on both the Earth Island Journal and the Footloose Montana Facebook page
expressed outrage over the photos. Many viewers were angry Bransford posed
for a portrait with the wounded wolf before killing it.

Dave Linkhart,
spokesman for the National Trappers Association, said there's nothing wrong
with a trapper posing with his catch before killing the animal."You pose
with a successful catch just like you do with a successful hunt," Linkhart
said. "People make the problem of attributing human feelings and emotions to
these animals."

Linkhart claimed trapped animals don't suffer, so
taking the time to shoot a photograph does not cross ethical boundaries.

"If you look at the trap -- across the pad of the foot like that -- if you
were to release the animal it would walk away like nothing happened," Linkhart said.Marc Bekoff is a former professor of ecology and
evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder and fellow of
the Animal Behavior Society who has studied the social behavior of wolves
and coyotes, among other animals."That wolf was suffering immeasurably.
Not only physically by having his foot locked in a trap, but also being shot
at," said Bekoff, the author of several books on animal psychology and
emotion. "This was not hunting. This was having an animal having its foot
smashed in trap and then shooting at it with bullets. This wolf was
tortured."

Linkhart said if the wolf was shot at, that isn't the
trapper's fault.

"Somebody else came up there and shot that animal
first. That is illegal. What the trapper has done here is not," Linkhart
said. "The problem was not the trap. It was the illegal activity of the
hunters who shot at that wolf."

Ever since Obama
and John Tester worked to remove wolves form the endangered species list for
political purposes, it's been bad times for wolves. Of course, there's a
track record for all of this. It was the failure of the states that
initially killed off the wolves to begin with, forcing them into the
government's hands and the Endangered Species List.

It looks like the
states are at it again, and this time Idaho is leading the path to
extermination.

There were many of us who cried foul when Tester
introduced a rider that would undermine the ESA, the first of its kind,
opening the door for wholesale destruction of species by single interests.
It was even more shocking when Obama signed the bill into law.

Reasonable people would expect a few wolves to be killed with rifles, and
that many of these would be clean. But there's nothing reasonable about the
wolf hate in Idaho , Montana , and Wyoming .

Recent images have
become available of a trapped wolf at the far end of a blood circle in the
snow. In the photo, a hunter appears to be smiling for a pose. Posters to
the website indicate the wolf was shot at while it waited for the trapper to
return. Who knows how long it was there, but it looked like quite a while
with all that blood in the snow.

Those who read the forum comments
may find the comments that describe the scene disturbing. The apparent
outright hate for such a beautiful animal species is shocking, and shows the
very worst of human nature.

On top of these disgusting events, there
looks to be big trouble at the top of the Idaho Game and Fish Commission,
where at a recent meeting Commission Chair Tony McDermott made
unsubstantiated population estimates of 1200-1600 wolves in Idaho , which is
far above the 560-575 wolves reported to be in the state on January 1.
Wildlife experts in the know countered the ridiculous claim, but no science
was given to back the numbers.

The stated goal of Idaho Wolf
management by the state is 150 wolves, or fifteen breeding pairs.

Idaho has more public land than most places in the lower 48, and more
wilderness as well. The state can easily hold far more wolves, and some feel
such a low number would make the packs nonviable.

You can read more
about the Idaho meeting, in which most attendees supported cutting back on
the hunt, here:

Wolves are being shot from the
air by helicopters. They are being trapped, and dying slow, painful deaths.
This is not what people expected when we delisted our symbol of wilderness.

If there's a bright spot in any of this, it's that the wolves can be put
back on the Endangered Species List if their populations fall below 150, or
if states show a management policy that endangers the animals. But with
biased state game agencies responsible for the counting, when using bad
numbers, whose to say how many wolves there really are? At the very least,
the counting program should be done at the federal level, away from the
state influence which is easily corrupted.

History is repeating
itself. Once again, states are attempting to exterminate the wolf, and Idaho
is leading the way. Will they succeed again? Will the wolf be put back on
that list? Take a look at the photos, friends.

John tester, you made
a mistake. President Obama, you made a mistake. Time to right a wrong.

These two are having themselves a great time, snaring and trapping
wolves, laughing their heads off. Killing animals is so much fun isn�t it? I
mean what�s not to love about a wolf being strangled to death??

The
videos were shot in Canada but there are pictures on the Internet showing
extreme cruelty to wolves caught in traps and snares in Idaho . They�re hard
to watch but necessary. This evil cannot be hidden anymore, it needs to be
spread far and wide for people to see. Wildlife have no protection from this
madness. This is legalized animal torture. What does this say about us as a
culture? Can we sit silently by while these animals are brutally killed?

How many Idaho wolves are stuck in traps or snares right now, without
food or water, scared to death, in excruciating pain waiting to die? Or
choking slowly to death in snares. Is this what we brought wolves back for?
Spent millions of taxpayer dollars, only to slaughter them back into
extermination? Where is the outrage? Are we just going to sit by and watch
this happen? Idaho has killed half of it�s wolves, 368 are dead in the
state. 534 DEAD in the Northern Rockies and that�s not counting Wildlife
Service killings, poaching, 10j and general wolf mortality. Pregnant alphas
are being slaughtered. When is the media going to cover this story? Shame on
your silence!

Traps and snares are indiscriminate killers. Wolf pups,
dogs or any animal, wild or domestic, is at risk.

It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless
minority keen to set brush fires in people�s minds�Samuel Adams